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Three years ago, during the Deepwater Horizon disaster, BP hired thousands of people across the
Gulf Coast to don protective suits and go out in boats to collect the oil or to scrape up the tar
balls washing ashore.

Now, the government is watching 33,000 of those people to see whether coming in contact with the
oil made them sick.

The vast study, overseen by the National Institutes of Health, began signing up participants in
2011 and should last for a decade. So far, “it confirms much of what you would expect,” said Dr.
Dale Sandler, who’s in charge.

The cleanup-crew workers were exposed to the oil more than most Gulf Coast residents, she said.
Many of them were people who had previously been unemployed. That means most of them had a history
of poor health care.

In the years after the oil spill, many of them have once again been unemployed, which limits
their access to care.

Add those things together, and the results are predictable, she said.

“People just generally feel lousy,” she said. “In part, it’s because more of those people are
out of work.”

Sandler’s findings so far are in sharp contrast to the results of a study released Friday by the
Government Accountability Project that focused on complaints about health problems among workers
exposed to the dispersant that BP sprayed on the spreading oil three years ago.

Workers complained of a wide range of ailments including blood in their urine, heart
palpitations, memory loss, rapid weight loss, seizures, skin irritation and temporary paralysis,
the report said. Many said they either received no safety training or were chastised for raising
safety questions.

BP strongly denies putting anyone at risk. During the spill, BP officials assembled teams of
toxicologists and industrial hygienists to assess potential risks to human health from the oil and
the dispersants, a company spokesman said.

The company also collected more than 30,000 of what it called “response worker personal
monitoring samples” to check on the cleanup crews’ exposure to toxic air pollution from the oil and
dispersants. Nearly all of them registered levels considered safe, the company said.